das gibt vielleicht noch den realistischsten Einblich, was kommen könnte...
A View of the Great Depression
by Caroline Bird
You could feel the Depression deepen, but you could not look out of the window and see it. Men who lost their jobs dropped out of sight. They were quiet, and you had to know just when and where to find them: at night, for instance, on the edge of town huddling for warmth around a bonfire, or even the municipal incinerator; at dawn, picking over the garbage dump for scraps of food or salvageable clothing.
In Oakland, California, they lived in sewer pipes the manufacturer could not sell. In Connellsville, Pennsylvania, unemployed steelworkers kept warm in the big ovens they had formerly coked. Outside Washington, D.C., one Bonus Marcher slept in a barrel filled with grass, another in a piano box, a third in a coffin set on trestles. Every big city had a"Hooverville" camp of dispossessed men living like this...
A 72-year-old factory worker was told that he could no longer be employed because he was too old. He went home and turned on the gas. His 56-year-old widow, who had worked as a proofreader before developing heart trouble, sat alone staring at their few sticks of furniture for three days after her husband's death. Then she too turned on the gas. The neighbors smelled it in time and saved her life....
The well of private charity ran dry. A Westchester woman is said to have fired all her servants in order to have money to contribute to the unemployed."Voluntary conscription" of wages helped steelworkers weather the first round of layoffs in... Pennsylvania, but the plan broke down as there were more mouths to feed and fewer pay envelopes to conscript. Local charities everywhere were overwhelmed by 1931, and the worst was yet to come.
Kentucky coal miners suffered perhaps the most. In Harlan County there were whole towns whose people had not a cent of income. They lived on dandelions and blackberries. The women washed clothes in soapweed suds. Dysentery bloated the stomachs of starving babies. Children were reported so famished they were chewing up their own hands. Miners tried to plant vegetables, but they were often so hungry that they ate them before they were ripe. On her first trip to the mountains, Eleanor Roosevelt saw a little boy trying to hide his pet rabbit."He thinks we are not going to eat it," his sister told her,"but we are."
In West Virginia, miners mobbed company stores demanding food. Mountain people, with no means to leave their homes, sometimes had to burn their last chairs and tables to keep warm. Local charity could not help in a place where everyone was destitute....
Every serious dieter knows how little food it takes to keep alive. One woman borrowed 5O cents, bought stale bread at 3 and a half cents a loaf, and kept her family alive on it for 11 days. Every serious dieter knows how hunger induces total concentration on food. When eating tight, the poor thought of nothing but food, just food. They hunted food like alley cats, and in some of the same places. They haunted docks where spoiled vegetables might be thrown out and brought them home to cook up in a stew from which every member of the family would eat as little as possible, and only when very hungry. Neighbors would ask a child in for a meal or give him scraps--stale bread, bones with a bit of good meat still on them, raw potato peelings. Children would hang around grocery stores, begging a little food, running errands, or watching carts in exchange for a piece of fruit. Sometimes a member of the family would go to another part of town and beg. Anyone on the block who got hold of something big might call the neighbors in to share it. Then everyone would gorge like savages at a killing, to make up for the lean days. Enough people discovered that a five-cent candy bar can make a lunch to boom sales during the generally slow year of 1931. You get used to hunger. After the first few days it doesn't even hurt; you just get weak. When work opened up, at one point, in the Pittsburgh steel mills, men who were called back were not strong enough to do it....
A reporter on The Detroit Free Press helped the police bring a missing boy back to a bare home on Christmas Day, 1934. He and his friends on the paper got a drugstore to open up so they could bring the boy some toys. The Detroit Free Press has supplied Christmas gifts for needy children every year since.
A teacher in a mountain school told a little girl who looked sick but said she was hungry to go home and eat something."I can't," the youngster said."It's my sister's turn to eat." In Chicago, teachers were ordered to ask what a child had had to eat before punishing him. Many of them were getting nothing but potatoes, a diet that kept their weight up, but left them listless, crotchety, and sleepy.
The police saw more than anyone else. They had to cope with the homeless men sleeping in doorways or breaking into empty buildings. They had to find help for people who fell sick in the streets or tried to commit suicide. And it was to a cop that city people went when they were at the end of their rope and did not know what else to do. In New York City, the police kept a list of the charities to which they could direct the helpless. In 1930 they took a census of needy families, and city employees started contributing one percent of their salaries to a fund for the police to use to buy food for people they found actually starving. It was the first public confession of official responsibility for plain poverty, and it came not from the top, but from the lowest-paid civil servants, who worked down where the poor people were.
Teachers worried about the children who came to school to get warm. They organized help for youngsters who needed food and clothing before they could learn. Sometimes Boards of Education diverted school funds to feed them. Often the teachers did it on their own. In 1932, New York City schoolteachers contributed $260,000 out of their salaries in one month. Chicago teachers fed 11,000 pupils out of their own pockets in 1931, although they had not themselves been paid for months."For God's sake, help us feed these children during the summer," Chicago's superintendent of schools begged the governor in June....
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Hallo,
ich denke in Deutschland gibt es noch genügend aktive Erinnerung an 1929 - 1933 und die Folgen.
Damals war nicht der Hunger das größte Problem (obwohl der schrecklich war),
damals war nicht die Arbeitslosigkeit das größte Problem (obwohl die schlimm war),
damals war nicht die Geldentwertung das größte Problem (obwohl die - mit etwas Verzögerung bis 1949 viele Hoffnungen vernichtete) -
meiner Meinung nach war damals das größte Problem, dass die Mehrheit der Menschen in Deutschland nicht auf ihre eigenen Fähigkeiten und Kenntnisse vertraute, sondern ihr Vertrauen in Parteien, Wahlen und den Staat setzte.
Hatte es bisher die eine oder andere Partei (Zentrum, SPD u.a.) es nicht richten können, sollte es nun eine neue Partei richten (NSDAP - Die KPD vertraute auch mehr auf die UdSSR als auf die eigenen Landsleute). Die Verschmelzung von NS-Partei, Großkapital und Staat brachte dann das Machtmonopol, das alles auf eine Karte setzte (Krieg, Expansion, Eroberung) und verlor.
Was hier im Elliott-Forum von einigen als individuelles Krisenrezept angepriesen wird: auf die eigenen Fähigkeiten und Fertigkeiten vertrauen, nicht auf Hilfe von oben warten, das funktioniert erwiesenermaßen auf Dorfebene für ein paar Tausend Menschen.
Mit ein paar Korrekturen funktioniert es auch auf Nationenebene für Millionen.
Gefahr droht erst, wenn wir unser Selbstvertrauen verlieren, und unser Schicksal in fremde Hände geben: Parteien, Regierung, Staat.
Gruß Wal
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Es wird gemeinhin immer so dargestellt, als ob die Deutschen kollektiv Hitler gewählt hätten:
Dies war nicht der Fall:
Bei der letzten Wahl waren es, 43,9 % eine Zahl, die auch eine Volkspartei heutiger Güte erreichen könnte. Das bedeutet, das noch zu diesem Zeitpunkt (wo m. E. schon einige Parteinen verboten waren), mehr als die Hälfte der Deutschen gegen Hitler war.
In Berlin
(wo man etwas besser über ihn informiert war) hatte Hitler sogar nur einen Anteil von ca. 34.6 %.
Was dann die gewählten Volksvertreter daraus gemacht haben, ist eine andere Frage.
Widerstand gab es auch mehr, als gemeinhin übermittelt wird. Hier ein paar Zahlen zu Tätern und Widerständlern.
Auch das wir ein Volk von Mitläufern waren, ist wohl auch so nicht haltbar.
Obwohl ich manchmal das Gefühl habe, dass es heute schlimmer ist als damals. Wenn man an die Geschichte denkt und wie wenig Widerstand den neuen"Ermächtigungsgesetzen" entgegengebracht wurde.
Aber auch hier agiert wieder die politische Klasse. Das Volk ist ja zu doof, um zu agieren und zu entscheiden.
Die Seite www.papesch.de/widerstand kann ich nur empfehlen, ein Heimatvertriebener, der - so wie ich sehen konnte - kein Revanchist und kein Brauner ist und die deutschen Untaten nicht beschönigt hat eine informative Seite aufgebaut, die mit einigen weit verbreiteten Vorurteilen aufräumt.
Meine Konsequenz nach dem Lesen der Seiten:
Mehr echte direkte Demokratie - direkte Entscheidungen durch das Volk.
Versaut haben es 33 und folgend die Parlamentarier.
Und die heutigen Parlamentarier machen mir, wenn ich die Folgen des 11.09.2001 sehen, auch schon wieder Angst.
Kalle
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